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Comment by msisk6 | Hacker News Reader

No, this is out in west Texas where wind is plentiful along with cheap land.

Nearly all wind and solar farms inject energy into the grid just like any other generator. In an open energy market like ERCOT (where this wind farm is located) there's a market where energy is traded.

If they inject "X" units of energy into the grid and pull out the same "X" units all is good. If not (the usual case since generation and demand need to equal 100% at all times) there are rules to govern the buying and selling of energy all generators ("market participants") follow.

Suffice it to say, grid management in an open energy market is complicated. If you really want to know more about the rules you can read more here: http://ercot.com/mktrules

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I would like to take a moment to appreciate that we seemingly have a pretty open, fair, and working regulatory system to make this possible. I am sure it's not perfect, but that you can do this at all is pretty cool.

One could argue that the possibility of having such structures in place is exactly what allows such a market to exist. In fact, the fair enforcement of laws and the viability of the laws themselves is perhaps one of the strongest foundations of progress in the developed nations.

But grids are local in nature correct? If they inject X unit of energy into the local West Texas grid and they pull X units from the grid in West Virginia where they have a datacenter, are all things equal? I'm having trouble wrapping my head around this.

A lot factors into it, but yes -- essentially grids are sort of local.

The US has three grids: East, West, and Texas.

Folks ask why Texas has its own grid and we generally say "because Texas", but the real reason is just the way the grid grew in the early 20th century. Texas was isolated from the big industrial centers of the coasts and had abundant internal energy sources (coal and oil) so it just grew into its own grid and stayed that way.

Inside each grid the frequency is internally regulated. Each grid is out of sync with each other so power transfer between grids is limited. A tie between grids requires converting energy to DC and back into AC synchronized to the receiving grid. ERCOT has 5 of these ties and their capacity is a small percentage of the demand. Additionally, there's a few generators at the border of the grid than can operate on two different grids (one grid at a time). They choose where to operate depending on pricing.

Another problem to deal with is transmission capacity. If you have too much generation away from demand transmission gets congested. To deal with this we have nodal markets (http://www.ercot.com/content/wcm/training_courses/14/nodal10...).

> Additionally, there's a few generators at the border of the grid than can operate on two different grids

Note that this wind farm is located right on the border between ERCOT and SPP (Eastern grid member). Depending on transmission capacity buildout I could imagine them being switchable.

yep and being a generator will probably give them direct access to this market. I'm wondering if turning some of the AWS computing power toward playing the energy market isn't some of the motivation here.

are any of the Amazon Data Centers located in ERCOT? Not that I could find in a quick search?

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